‘It’s Going to Take $8 Million in Financing’

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Stephanie Stucky tells Paul DS and Liz picarazzi that she and her Partners have taken their business from $2 million in annual revenue to more than $13 million in just 3 years what's frustrating she says is that she could be selling a lot more pean snacks and candies but with production at capacity she's not doing much sales Outreach until they can fully revamp their manufactur facturing operation which will require a significant investment I spend my days doing financial paperwork Stephanie tells us plus Liz explains why her business picks up when the weather warms up and after a slow start Paul gets a big Boost from a big manufacturer even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by our principal sponsor the great game of business will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which magazine named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Paul DS who is CEO of Paul Downs cabinet makers which makes custom conference tables outside of Philadelphia Liz picarazzi who's CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins and Stephanie Stucky who's CEO of Stucky which is based in Ren Georgia and makx peacon snacks and candies the episode is titled it's going to take $8 million in financing welcome to the 150th episode of the 21 hats podcast we're here today with Paul Liz and Stephanie it's great to have you all here and it's especially great to catch up with you Stephanie um I know you've been busy how are you how's it going I'm doing great thank you I have been busy it's nice to be back well welcome uh tell us I I think it's been more than a year since we've talked to you how did last year go for you so just for background people who might be newer to the show and not remember the story I am the third generation of a family business duckies founded by my grandfather he sold the company in 1964 it was out of our family hands for decades I had the unexpected opportunity to buy it three years ago it was six figures in debt people familiar with the brand probably know us as a roadside convenience retail chain we only have 60 locations today and we don't own or operate any of them they pay us a licensing fee so we had to rebuild the brand in a way that would make us more profitable because we don't generate a lot of funds from those licenses so we purchased a manufacturing fac facility that shells pecans and then makes pecan snack candies and pecan snacks so that happened two years ago and in the past year what we've done is we decided to get out of the shelling business that was a big move for us we're in the process of moving and selling all the shelling equipment and we're doubling our capacity to make the finished product so we're going to make more pecan snacks and more pecan candies because the demand is grow growing so we're getting more Machinery we're hiring new Workforce we Consolidated all of our operations into one place so we moved our distribution center which had been in another town we just moved that we just upgraded with scanning technology and realtime inventory we just finished integrating all three companies that we've purchased into One Financial system so just a lot of internal structural work to strengthen and grow our Capac capacity and really I think by Q4 is our goal to start just growing with sales because we'll now have the capacity to actually fulfill it's been a lot that is a lot while you're were doing all that did your revenue for last year Meet expectations no no I'll be honest I think quite often there's this thought that you know you're always on this trajectory of going upwards and the sales were on a trajectory of going upwards but the net was not for several reasons one is we're putting in these processes so that all takes time so we weren't as diligent as we should have been on our accounts receivable for example if we had been collecting like we should and we had a strong process in place we would have ended the year much stronger now we've collected those but it took us a while to put that process in place we also gave three rounds of pay raises to our Workforce and that was our biggest expense last year and it was the most important expense because we really had to shore up our Workforce so turnover has gone down dramatically Workforce satisfaction has gone up we're doing a lot of work with culture and employee engagement and all that's paying off but it takes a while it takes an investment of money and time and energy to put the structure in place so that you can start growing what were the companies that you bought so they're stues of course and then we merged with my business partner had a snack brand called front porch pean so we had to merge his records with our records and then the two of us jointly bought like 6 months later the manufacturing facility in Rens Georgia which includes the shelling operations and the candy operations in a fundraising business and actually those three entities all kept separate books were all organized as separate legal entities so we've had to consolidate all their books I think too often we read about these mergers in the news and we think it's once you sign on the dotted line and you transfer the paperwork and the finances that it's done but no integrating the financials integrating the culture integrating the workforce making sure you're not duplicating roles or maybe you want some redundancy making sure people understand what each other is doing uh we we've had to completely redo our org chart so it's just that's taking time and now that we're really close to having everything in place I'm excited I feel like can start focusing more on sales and less on Logistics and supply and HR and finances I I have a question yes the last time you were here was preco right no I was here during Co I'm just wondering how the general disruption in travel and what have you affected the brand not really because people continue to buy snacks and candies and we've been expanding the channel where you can buy our products so we're not just Distributing to those 60 plus stues license locations we're now in some 5,000 stores nationwide through distributor networks so we're in some of the larger Chains would be Food Lion Les Wawa in Florida we're in some Big Lots at home we're about to be piloted and pilot and ta as well Travel Centers of America and and we have a lot of mom and popop locations all over the country that sell our product Ace Hardware and local grocery stores and gift shops hotels you name it you had told us about that a little bit Stephanie and I think one of the challenges you faced was figuring out how to price your goods depending on where they were being sold that's right how has that worked out for you you know I've learned and it's it's a process that there's different pricing models for different channels so if you're going through a distributor obviously you're going to have to alter for distributor pricing and if you have a broker then the broker's going to take their whatever 3 to 5% and the distributor is going to take their 30% and then if you're in the grocery Channel then the grocer is usually going to be 33 to 50% so there's that whole world right and I would put Costco and Walmart and some of those in in that category and then you have to pay the slotting fees you have to pay The Upfront setup fee for the warehouse house I mean the fees are phenomenal and then you've got the specialty retail which has a lot more flexibility on the price structure you know we distribute direct to them from our distribution center so the specialty Mart and Fort Smith Arkansas for example might have a higher retail price but you're paying for being in a nice store environment well you went from 60 Outlets to 6,000 that's really impressive about 5,000 but it's through the distributor networks right so they're different types of you're there right yeah and we're online yeah it's been and fundraising too is a huge business for us well it's very impressive well done I was just looking at our fundraising numbers this week last year we did over three million in sales for fundraising can you tell us what your annual sales are now as opposed to where you were yes in the past three years we've gone from 2 million to over 13 million that's fantastic yeah congratulations yeah but we're really held back we could do so much more and that's what's so frustrating is we are not proactively pitching accounts other than our Distributors will do pitches with some large retail chains to get us in a planogram for example but we're not out there proactively Marketing sales because we don't have the capacity to fulfill orders right now so you won't see us on Amazon you don't see us on fair.com which is for specialty retail because don't have the Fulfillment capacity yet so we're trying to scale at a way that makes sense for us so we don't disappoint a lot of customers because they place an order and five months later we still don't have the product ready so I guess that's what drove the decision to stop shelling and to start making more candy tell us about that decision are are there risks in that do you lose some control by not doing your own shelling honestly after we started delving into it we realized that the biggest hold back for us was that the facility we purchased had been shelling since 1935 and the community was used to us having a shelling plant there but shelling operates from October through January it's seasonal and we were having to keep this whole facility active like we had all the space that we were paying for we're paying mortgage on we're paying maybe not to keep it super chill but we certainly had to keep it climate controlled we had some staffers that we had to keep year round because they were so valuable and we really only used them 5 months out of the year I'd go see them in the off months and they'd just be sitting around talking reading the paper all day and I thought why do we have you on salary we really employed them just a handful of months a year then we had to train up seasonal Workforce every year we had to ramp that up and it was just exhausting so now we have an exclusive contract with a pan sheller from Georgia so Georgia grown ions and we're actually going to save money not having to Shell and then we can more than double our capacity to produce but it's going to take 8 million in financing to renovate the shelling facility to be food grade certified we have to get a new roof we have to insulate we have to air condition the whole section more because we're making chocolate and we roast pecans and it gets really hot in there so there's a ton of work that has to be done and then we have to buy new equipment and higher up staff so it's about eight million I spend my days doing financial paperwork how are you going to finance that we're doing two different main ways first is New Market tax credits and that will bring in about 1.5 to 1.9 million depending on how it all shakes up at the end and that should close in two weeks how does that work I'm not familiar with it I was afraid you're going to ask me that and I have a very high level understanding and like any of these government related Financial programs you almost always need to have a person whose whole role is to package it and organize it for you and then they get a cut so if our guy was on the phone he could explain it better but basically it's a program to incentivize job creation in rural communities or economically disadvantaged communities often through manufacturing and they really like Agra business projects and the Federal government offers tax credits as an incentive and there's a mechanism by which you can sell your tax credits to third-party entities at a reduced rate so you monetize your tax credit and you get the tax credit proceeds right away to apply to whatever project you want and then the entity buying the tax credit gets to use it over a period of years so we actually get cash with no obligation on our end other than a bunch of reporting which is why we have a a guy who is going to take his cut to manage all of that process and then the rest of the financing is coming from a USDA food processing loan and we're working with a Maris Bank in Augusta Georgia which is right near where our plant is and they've been terrific they do a lot of these USDA food processing loans and they have the contacts and they can pick up the phone and get the right person and that should close in July so you've been watching interest rates for some time I'm guessing yeah yes and that's one of the reasons why we're doing the USDA because we started we purchased the plant with the SBA 7A loan which is a variable rate and that those payments have been going up we're paying some of that down and then we're refy with the USDA loan at better terms interesting Stephanie if I recall correctly when last we spoke you described the way you divy responsibilities up with your partner as you being primarily focused on marketing it's sounds like you've gotten quite an education in manufacturing since then can you talk a little bit about what you've learned uh about manufacturing and how this has going for you yeah so it's really been all hands on deck my business partner remains more focused on the operations in but you have to understand that if you're going to be a partner and so I spend a lot of time just observing and watching and I actually work shifts so I understand the process and we have an overall plant manager so he does a lot of that as well uh my role still tends to be more external and connecting with resources to help us get the workforce where we need to be so we've been working for example Georgia Tech has a manufacturing program and a sliding scale basis and they'll come in and they'll help you analyze how you can better do the layout of your plant I'm better at the big picture thinking so after working a bunch of shifts being very much in the day-to-day grunge work of running a candy plant and a snack plant operation I realized there were some inefficiencies and how we were laying out our equipment and what the workflow was and where we stored our ingredients and so we all work together on this and we're now reconfiguring the workspace so that's been a lot like how do you how do you have the workflow in a way that maximizes productivity so that's one of the things I've been doing and I'll be perfectly honest a lot of my time this past year has been building the connections that will help us as we start to grow so I just joined the National confectioners Association board of directors that's going to be a big commitment I also do a ton of keynote speaking events so I've been traveling all over the country and I get paid to do that which has been really nice and what I started doing was negotiating the pay with instead of paying me cash I want you to buy $5,000 worth of Stucky gift tins for your corporate gift program which gets our product in front of hundreds of corporate execs throughout the country and usually the talks I'm giving are to associations and industries that can help Advance our name so I just spoke at a national convenience store conference where there were CEOs of major convenience stores from all over the country I spoke at the national confectioners Association twice last year which was all the players in the sweet and snack industry I talked to food shipper organizations Trucking associations uh Economic Development associations so all of that has been helping to advance the brand and it gives me something to do until I can really start selling Liz I think I know the answer to this question but hearing Stephanie talk about her Factory setup does it give you any thoughts about building your own own facility to make your own product instead of Outsourcing it no it's hard no I mean honestly I know this is not politically correct but I really like my Factory in China yes uh We've a great relationship with them we've done some you know product development they were a really great partner during the supply chain issues and as you know Lauren I spent a good three months a couple of years ago RFP out our bins to manufacturers in the US I have to emphasize it was a huge amount of my time and it came back that on average we would have to pay 67% more to manufacture here in the US so no I don't have an interest in that I would have if you would asked me two years ago because I really wanted to do that like as an American I would have loved to have been able to do that and if it was possible I definitely would have but we got that ruled out and you know the other thing is that we're manufacturers but yet we're not so we're not like a pul Downs where we're fabricating you know individual custom things with you know very high skilled labors ours are modular they're ready to install they're prefab so for us to have a very efficient Factory that we have a great relationship with is just I feel really comfortable with that now having done the research yes if you're not manufacturing now and you think oh I'll just do that you're you're in for a world of pain and I think that Stephanie benefited from basically moving into operations that were already up and running and they needed a ton of work clearly but somebody knew how to make the product in the building when you arrived so trying to go from scratch very tough I would also add that we have a factory that's located in the heart of where our main commodity is produced so it's a different model almost every product we make has pecans in it and we happen to be in the number one state for production of pecans in the country so it just made sense for us logistically to have the manufacturing cited right where our main commodity is being produced I mean it becomes an interesting question do you want to locate your business near where the customers are or near where the people who know how to do it are because there are definitely clusters of skills in various Industries in various places mhm and if you want to locate near the Workforce then the big issue becomes distribution and Liz you're about to run into this if you have to ship all over the country how do you do the installs it's it's never easy to balance that where you make it and where you sell it and how you get it between the two of them and what needs to happen when it arrives and the best thing is to be able to just put something in a box give it to UPS or the post office and then you're done yeah well that is what we do but you have big things don't they need some assembly they do but we have assembly videos we have really good manuals we've actually never had a complaint from anybody in California or even Hawaii we've been shipping lately about uh ability to install that's great good for you Stephanie can you tell us more about those I think you said three raises that you gave to to the workforce was that driven by turnover or by inability to hire more people or both both and also just wanting that to be part of our culture that we we treat people with respect and it was really important to me when we first purchased the company I should know the the starting wage it it was like $9 an hour and we have given modest raises of across the board but then what we've also which I think is more important we've put in a pay scale within you know a certain period of time I believe it's 30 days they automatically get a bump if they stay with us so that was really important as well was just to keep people you know letting them know that there's a pathway to Prosperity that this is not just a working on a conveyor belt or working in the roasting room all day long like you can have a chance to advance so we're working with a local technical school to offer skills everything from food safety certification to forklift training and so the more you advance in your skills the more you have opportunity to be a shift leader and then you can be a manager and so far we have been promoting from within for all of these sort of shift leads and management we want to delegate more the duties that the plant manager is doing and we're delegating that to folks on his team to give them more responsibility like procurement of ingredients so we're now looking at designating someone in charge of procurement we made one person who was just a really Stellar employee we said you're now in charge of food safety your your job is food safety operations you're no longer working on the plant floor so just really building a team and building a culture where this is this can be your career if you come here we want you to stay at one point you were concerned about an Amazon facility that was scheduled to open did that in fact open and has it been an issue Yeah we actually have not lost a single employee to Amazon so we're very proud of that are your wages comparable to what they pay slightly lower but people have said we would rather work here because we feel like we belong to a family really and we just hired a new staff person and well he's he's management level and his role we're giving him a couple roles but one of them is working on culture so he's having one-on-one conversations with every single employee This Confidential that's going to be antiz and asking them how can we build a better Workforce what do you need to have more workplace satisfaction are there any issues concerns that we need to address and we just want them to know that this is a place where they can hopefully enjoy their job I don't know if everyone who works for Amazon can say that but we're in their Community Amazon was 28 miles away so we employ a lot of people who don't have ready Transportation so you know quite a few can walk or uh they they carpool Rens Georgia is Tiny and so we draw from this community where we're we're based and they don't have to put you know 50 miles a day on their used car that doesn't drive that well so there's an advantage to being right where they're located how many employees do you have now we have 90 FTE and when I bought the company we had nine I wow 10 times in three years that's a lot of hiring yeah and we we expect to add 50 in the next few years with this expansion but a lot of the expansion is going to be equipment and Machinery so the roles that we're looking for I mean we now have our Machinery you know our machine shop and our repair team that crew is five now so we're getting skilled jobs these are folks that need to be able to repair high functioning you know 300,000 $400,000 machinery and how are things going with your partner I believe you have a a 50/50 deal every time that comes up some of your colleagues on this podcast I think break out and hives just at the thought of having a 50/50 partner has it worked out for you it's worked out great and we actually have a third partner who owns 10% and my business partner and I each own 45% and the the new partner owns a marketing firm his name is Ted Wright and he's been just incredible asset to be part of our team frankly we needed some money to help with cash flow as we were doing our pay raises and we said if we're going to do the pay raises we we we need an influx of cash so we really aren't looking for private Equity or anything like that but more strategic investor and so Ted has really been a partner he came forward with the cash and he's at the table and even though he owns less than we do we bring him in on all major decisions but we just get along great and we had written up in the paperwork when we had the new guy come on that he couldn't be the tiebreaker if RG and I had a dispute so we didn't want this person with 10% essentially having the ability to trump our decisions so to speak so we structure it in a way that the main two entities as far as the decision- making are me and my business partner so how do you make decisions if you disagree we haven't disagreed so far we we have disagreed initially and then we work through it and we have discussions we listen to each other and every single time what we end up with is some hybrid of what we each were originally proposing I've got a question Stephanie so if you sold the 10% or brought in an investor partner at 10% I imagine you needed to have valuation done so if you did that how did that work out and the reason I'm asking is I'm at that point where I would consider taking on you know a lower stake partner but I know that the valuation would need to happen first well we were fortunate that we had just purchased this other company and we had just merged all of this happened within a year year and so we had valuations that had already been done and it was an internal so it's not like we had uh when we did the valuation to merge our companies we did go to the US Small Business Development Center at the University of Georgia and they have Financial experts who will do valuations for you they gave us two different people to do valuations so we have people representing each side it was it was really well done so we already had all of that done it was fairly painless for us I will say that there are some resources out there there the Small Business Development Center is in every state and I I found that to be a great resource thanks check that out Liz how's your year gotten started has business been good so I have to say we had a softer q1 than I anticipated um we were down 5% to last year you know we normally get paid 100% upfront or the day of installation we've had some where people are taking longer to pay and then we've also noticed that you know in buildings getting trash enclosures where there's let's say a board of directors or some sort of other decision maker those decisions are taking a lot longer so in terms of sales we're down um things are warming up a lot the last couple of weeks when it gets warmer and people spend more time outside the trash becomes more evident so we always have a little bit of seasonality in the warmer months people are spending time outside and they're noticing the trash in front of their homes so we've had that pickup you know I have been spending a lot of time on Business Development and Partnerships and it really is because there's a couple of areas with our product where we have hit like a limit in what our expertises and a lot of it has to do with hardware and locks so I've been reaching out to a lot of companies that seem to want to do potentially sell us some locks but then the next level up could be doing some sort of partnership but then even a level above that there has been some little bit of hint that some an acquisition could be in the future if a partnership went well so that's really got my mind engaged and um meeting them acquiring you or you acquiring yes yeah and like I said I certainly it's not like that's happening but if I think of like what are the three levels of relationship that we could have with this lock you know manufacturer I'm talking to the first one would just be they sell us locks the second would be they do a partnership where we include them in all of the pr that we're getting about our bins in various cities we're working in Boston Philly Newark Hoboken and talking about five other cities so I'm hoping that with a partnership they might be interested in really getting their brand out there with us for a very noble cause which is keeping streets clean and then a level above that would be potential acquisition so for this company I did talk to a couple of the companies their portfolio companies that were acquired that had been independent like mine um one of them was actually an EO connection where like I have nothing in common with this guy other than being an EO and oh I guess making lockers that is a pretty big commonality but I had a great conversation with him and that got me really excited about you know down the line might this be something I would consider and I wasn't eager on something like that like a year ago but now I am because we are hitting some limitations in our ability to grow and I would much rather grow through a partnership than through more debt or taking on investors you've talked to us about the pilot projects you've had in place with various Municipal entities business districts have any of those reached the point where the district has made a decision about whether to roll us out in you know greater numbers or so I think the best city to talk about is New York you know where this all got started and we've been doing two types of Pilots with the Department of Sanitation one is with business Improvement districts so we're in 18 of the 76 business Improvement districts in New York the second type is the residential pilot and that is on a whole entire block of of Manhattan 45th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues and I actually went there this morning I go every once once in a while to kind of check things out and we do know that they're not planning on rolling that out that was something that was never officially communicated but we know that we're not in the budget that's going to be announced in June so it's a little bit disappointing but at the same time we know that the business improvement district model works much better for us because there is in most of these districts they have full-time cleaning crews that take care of the trash and take care of the sweeping and if there's illegal dumping around the bins they're going to put that stuff away with residential there isn't that level of kind of supervision and so there's a lot of different constituents there's the superintendent of buildings there's the sanitation workers themselves you know there's the neighborhood there's various political parties involved and it's really hard to get them to agree on something that would scale out that doesn't have full in so to answer your question in a long-winded way we are doing well in New York with the business Improvement districts but the residential plan that could have potentially rolled out Citywide it's not going to happen and do you think that's primarily for budgetary reasons or because they were disappointed in the way it turned out so I think it's a combination of both I spend a lot of time with sanitation workers these days and I can tell that if someone's been working as a sanitation worker for 20 30 years and they're used to taking a trash bag from the sidewalk and hurling it into the truck they're not going to want to now open a door with a lock that may not always work as well as any of us would like to then pull the trash out and put it so it's it does slow them down that was part of it I think part of it is that there's only so many things that the department of sanitation can do and they have a lot of other higher profile initiatives that probably are getting the funding but yeah I mean in terms of also with New York we've got um so many utilities under the streets so for them to do some sort of a containerization that's underground is going to be very difficult so some people think that there will be a renewed interest in doing the type of containerization that City bin does which is above ground because it's much more cost effective and easier to implement than you know some sort of a model like they have in Amsterdam or Paris or Barcelona where they have um trucks that hoist up the the bins from Subterranean but it sounds like your relationships with the business Improvement districts have gone really well you you seem to have a lot more of those than than I recall you mentioning the last time we talked yes so those are really good relationships and some of them are buying more so those that piloted them you know starting with Time Square they started with four intersections and they're going to have 10 soon um so they've been really happy and you know obviously if you can make it in Time Square you can make it anywhere so if my bins have survived the trash and the rats and the tourist of Time Square I know that they're going to do it anywhere I really do but their level of kind of Maintenance of those bins is higher than it would be on a residential block because on residential blocks it's just you know tenants and supers and a lot of other players so with business Improvement districts that's part of what has helped us get into other cities because they can see what we did with business Improvement districts across New York you know we have lists contact lists for all of those bids Nationwide one thing I'm really excited about it hasn't really rolled out yet so maybe I shouldn't be talking about it but I will anyways yeah I know you love that Lauren we have always thought there's an opportunity to do group purchasing program with you know municipalities or higher ed or even with some of our existing clients like property managers and so I would really like to go to cities and New York obviously being the first and offer the bid Association which is 76 commercial districts in New York City a way to buy at a discount with a deeper discount if they buy together at the same time so I'm kind of you know circulating this this idea with people that are smarter than me and are more involved with City and with bids to to see what their input is but the input from them has been very favorable Paul the the last couple of times you've been on you've talked about how your sales have been considerably off from your expectations any movement there yeah we we had a good week last week we got one very large order from a major manufacturer who's going to be using us to produce a product for one of their customers that they could not or would not put through their factories and this is a the kind of relationship which I think has a lot of future for us where big companies set up their production lines and they just really can't accommodate custom requests and there's been an ecosystem of companies that could do that kind of work but the number of companies and the number of workers who know how to do it is shrinking and uh so we just landed our first relationship of that type and we're doing a pilot project for a company that's moving its headquarters from Connecticut to Tennessee because they're a gun maker and I guess they don't want to be in Connecticut anymore and uh and so we're going to be doing the boardroom for that company and that's a pretty good siiz order put us closer to where we needed to be we're still down about 15 20% but I that's way better than 40% it seems like the pace of sales coming in is starting to pick up a little bit so in better shape than I was a couple weeks ago can you explain that the the relationship you you started to describe imagine you're say Chevrolet and somebody's like I love Chevrolets I'm buying a fleet of Chevrolets and for my own Chevrolet I want one with wings and uh and Chevrolet will say yeah we're happy to sell you the whole Fleet but the one with wings can't do it and so that's the kind of thing where we come in and and put the wings on the Chevy that's not even the best way to put it because we're not modifying somebody else's product what we're doing is selling our services and our ability to customize through a channel that's a relationship with a huge manufacturer and that manufacturer wins because they're able to outfit the entire headquarters with their standard products and keep the leadership team Happy by being able to provide the very customized table for the big boardroom is that clear I think so so that's why you're hopeful that this could lead to more business in the future yeah because we we had to get I mean they came and sniffed around to make sure that we're for Real uh sent a team of of uh people who evaluate outside vendors to my shop and and spent a day looking at our operations and me explaining why just because we're relatively small doesn't mean we're not capable and was able to show them all of our systems and talk about some of our other clients who are very impressive and show them the operation and I guess we passed muster and the the people who came knew what they were looking at that was a very knowledgeable crew so that was a nice pat on the back for for us having assembled a level of skill and also a level of I would call it um sort of systems horsepower power that when you look under the hood of my company it's not just me trying to juggle a bunch of uh Excel sheets to run these these jobs we actually have an Erp and we can interact with the largest organizations in a way that makes sense to everybody involved and I think that that's a big part of getting qualified for this kind of relationship and having gotten the first job of course I'm emphasizing to my people that this is incredibly important to us cuz they told us the the client told us that they get 10 or 15 of these opportunities a year and they've just been telling the clients their clients to go you know can't do it and so this would be a way for them to be able to say yes and and it would be feeding us very high value projects directly with someone who uh who we're familiar working with I hope it's the start of great things because I would like to have this kind of relationship with more than one company and I don't know how those companies feel about about that but there's really no reason why we couldn't be doing business with more people who are in the industry running factories and need some custom well the Intriguing thing to me is that this sounds like the kind of client that you are hoping to attract through the big marketing campaign that you are uh looking forward to unleashing you know clients that will lead to you know multiple sales and not just one by one yeah it it is although it's not necessarily what that campaign is aimed at because there's there's various different ways someone could say hey we want a crazy big table and where are we going to get it so it could happen coming from the design team it could happen coming from in this case from a manufacturer that was putting together a huge order to outfit the entire building and just needed something for one room and for whatever reason the client I think that we were approached by someone from the the gun manufacturer and then we got involved and then they got introduced us to the big furniture manufacturer and I I actually don't know exactly how how it happened but I'm pretty sure that that's what happened so that our existing marketing efforts and our position on Google always turns up cool stuff now and then the problem is a lot of times that's one and done and so how do you turn these singular opportunities into ongoing relationships and that's just a trickier thing so we'll see how it all plays out but the first thing is to make this table and do a great job on it I think it's brilliant I think it's an amazing model and um you know you're also helping them look good to their client because they're able to offer something beyond what they normally would do yeah and one of the nice things is they're not pretending they're doing it so the client knows that we exist and knows the name of our company and they've been working directly with my people and what we found in the industry is that there often the people in between us and the final user don't really want to reveal that we exist and that's a problem because then we're just being commoditized and also it's much harder for us to do the kind of job we want to do if we can't be in in regular contact with the end user because they're the ones who understand their own problems and if we're trying to get some analysis of of what they want through three different layers of people who may or may not be helpful or smart then uh then it's just it just doesn't work so the idea that we're partnering with a big company that's going to say hey we have these guys we vetted them they're good here you go that's a huge win for us have you joined the NRA you know it's funny because I no personally I would not do that but I have a lot of employees who are very into guns and um a lot of my clients are very into guns we we sell a lot to the military I don't think that in my business it would be wise to put any kind of particular political spin on who I don't do or don't do business with and with some exceptions but uh I I got to put up a wall between my own personal politics and and who we accept money from because it's a big world and if you only confine yourself to people who who are exactly like you you're not doing your employees a favor is the main thing if we're limiting the growth of the company because I'm on my high horse about this or that then it just limits the opportunity of my of me to either retain and pay my people or attract new people and grow the company Amen to that yeah you know that famous quote by Michael Jordan says Republicans by sneakers too y yeah wouldn't get political and I have a background where I served 14 years in the Georgia legislature as a member of a political party but you will not see political post on any of my social media because I represent stues now and I want everyone Libertarians Independents Republicans Democrats as long as they have money I'm they're welcome here's the other thing is that I'm you know like we've been dealing with all kinds of people for years and I've had a million phone calls with some person who I'm pretty sure would disagree with me on a lot of things but we always find a lot to agree on too yes the makeup of the average woodworker is very different from me and I've got great relationships with all kinds of people in the industry because we're all in it together and I think it it's it's a hopeful sign that okay you got a huge country a lot of people in it a lot of different beliefs there is a way to get along and one way is to just like do the business and let that be the thing that draws you together and that kind of keeps the rest of it from getting out of hand so I think it's really important that everybody decide to do business with everybody they can and not turn their nose up at any particular position for whatever reason that's that's a bad idea well actually I also think it's a healthy thing for the country at large I mean I I like to think maybe I'm humoring myself but I like to think doing what we do here is a way to bring people together who disagree on a lot of things but see some commonality in you know trying to build a business and the more conversations like that that get started the the healthier it is for everybody I absolutely agree I think it's only a good thing if we can talk to each other particularly if we can discuss things that are politically neutral and I think how to care for your employees how to how to grow your business how to make payroll those things shouldn't have a political spin on them because everybody's got basically the same problem how do I satisfy customers how do I find more how do I get money and how do I spend it those things yeah you could you could put a political spin on them but most small business owners are not at a level where they can even indulge that so I'm I'm glad we're all coming together that there's some geographic distribution and some ideological distribution well before we start singing We are the world I think I'm going to conclude this podcast my thanks to Paul DS Liz picarazzi and Stephanie Stucky and of course to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to help build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com thanks everybody wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren at21 hats.com that's l r n at21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think he can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]